Josephine Meckseper
Gerhard Richter, Sinbad
February 23–May 26, 2011
The FLAG Art Foundation
545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor
New York, NY, 10001, USA
Open to the public Wednesday through Saturday 11am to 5pm
www.flagartfoundation.org
The FLAG Art Foundation presents an exhibition of new works by Josephine Meckseper on FLAG’s 9th floor space, and Sinbad, an exhibition of 98 paintings by Gerhard Richter, on the 10th floor. The shows will close on May 26th.
JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER
New York based artist Josephine Meckseper employs window displays, vitrines, installations, photographs, films and magazines to draw a direct correlation to the way consumer culture defines subjectivity and sublimates the key instruments of individual political agency.
At the FLAG Art Foundation, Meckseper presents new works focusing on retail environments and modernist concepts. Industrial reflective slatwalls, a staple of bargain store design, mirror the car dealerships of 11th Avenue. Chromed wheels, car headlights and logos flash across the sculptures and cellophane-wrapped paintings, like detritus after a crash. The traditional allure of the automobile is undercut with its demise, giving the entire exhibition a destabilizing undercurrent of fear.
The strong rectilinear lines of her exhibited vitrines, all steel and glass, recall Mies van der Rohe. Like the auto industry, modernism too represented a twentieth-century idealism of essentialism and clarity in both art and life. In her invocation of its forms, Meckseper suggests that the hard-edged lines of essentialism in art are undergoing the same reconsideration as the American auto industry.
Josephine Meckseper’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Migros Museum, Zürich (2009), Nottingham Contemporary (2008), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008) and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2007). Her work has consistently been featured in international biennials including the Whitney Biennial (2006 and 2010), and is currently on view at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates.
A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with installation images and contributions by John Cassidy, James Frey, Stephen Roach and an interview with Francesco Bonami.
GERHARD RICHTER, Sinbad
Sinbad is the first series of works by Richter to allude to The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), and was followed in 2010 by Aladdin. These small works—presented behind glass and arranged into forty-nine diptych pairs—explore concepts of chance and abstraction. Each piece, considered autonomous though it plays off its partner, contains drips, smears, and swaths of color.
About the FLAG Art Foundation
The FLAG Art Foundation is an exhibition space for contemporary art. The program includes 3 to 5 professionally-curated shows each year by established and emerging international artists. We are on the 9th and 10th floors of the Chelsea Arts Tower, located in the heart of New York’s art district on 25th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.
FLAG provides a unique educational environment in which visitors can view, contemplate, and engage in active dialogue with the artworks. Curators select and borrow from a variety of sources to include a wide range of work in each exhibition. FLAG is also a resource that facilitates loans of contemporary artworks to museums around the world. An extensive database of available works is maintained and made available to curators via info@flagartfoundation.org.
